Speaking from a python user's perspective, the batteries included philosophy works great when you have a neutral implementation. Python does a good enough job, and provides extensibility in a way that I don't need to download a package to do basic things. On the other I have to spend hours trying to find a package in JS that just gets shit done. The third party package way is only required for ui parts because you don't want everything to look generic. But having a good standard library to do non user facing stuff is essential. That's why every node project ends up with a thousand dependencies. Because the language is not batteries included. There in JS there is no "one correct and obvious way to do everything" which makes doing basic programming painful.